


He's Got a Repousse Print

by executrix



Category: Blakes7
Genre: AU, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-11
Updated: 2011-05-11
Packaged: 2017-10-19 06:17:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/197863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Travis takes drastic action to improve his job satisfaction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He's Got a Repousse Print

COUNTESS: _Forgive? (Pause) Yes, I will forgive you, for I am kinder than you._ (The Marriage of Figaro)

GLOUCESTER: _I stumbled when I saw._ (King Lear)

2.

"I wasn't worth killing then," Travis said, holding up his hands (both sorts). "I'm so much the less worth killing now."

"I think I shall kill you anyway," Avon said.

Travis--to the extent that he cared if he lived or died anyway--wasn't much worried by this, given the inverse correlation between slanging matches and physical violence.

"This fell sergeant, Death, is strict in his arrest," Avon said. He'd always wanted to be able to say that--it was much classier than "You're toast".

"You think?" Vila asked. "I'd call him Corporal Punishment, more like."

"I'm in civvies," Travis said, quite truthfully. He looked smaller in the cheap grey shirt and trousers and sage-green tabard. There was something offputting about his glass eye (and the scars on his face showed up much more clearly now that the eyepatch was gone). The Lazeron ring was missing from his bionic arm. Travis had stripped off the black glove. The artificial fingers gleamed the sick pink of poor-quality sausages, bulging beneath their skins.

"How did you get here?" Cally asked.

"Went to a café...your computer there can pick up from anything that's got tarial cells. I sent a message, and after a bit of palaver he brought me up. We've got--that is, the Federation's got--lashings of those bracelets from every time we capture you lot."

"Orac!" Avon said, gazing reproachfully at the One who had so betrayed his trust.

+I determined from voice printing and brainwave analysis that this person was sincere in expressed wishes...+

"Namely?" Blake asked.

"The strontium grenade..." Travis said, and then looked down. He still couldn't get it out, so he closed his eye. "When the roof came down...one of your men..."

"Yes," Blake said, in a tone that Bek and Hanna would recognize.

"But he's..." Vila started, but Avon caught his eye and shook his head minutely and Cally said {{Don't tell him}}. Vila switched to the tone of unctuous piety that had often been a money-spinner in the past, and continued, "always in our hearts."

1\. (TWO MONTHS EARLIER)

Gan closed his eyes and said, "I'm not worth dying for." Blake said, "Now you're just being modest," and if Blake had had to dig him out unassisted then they probably both would have died. But the crew, united for once, pitched in.

Without a doctor on board, all they could do was put Gan into a stasis chamber. A bit of negotiation with several neutral planets uncovered one whose National Health Service would accept Gan as an out-of-network private patient (with a small chest of rubies as an incentive). The Advanced Neurosurgery Center managed to clear up the blood clots (and, as a side benefit, to take out the limiter). The plastic surgery was a doddle. The sawbones were just waiting for the implanted cells in his spine to finish regenerating.

At the start of his long convalescence, Gan asked to have his new face modeled on some of the most prominent vizzie stars. But then Phaaviel Liliang, the night nurse, convinced him to have everything put back more or less the same way, just different enough to confuse a biomorphic scanner. She liked him the way he was, she said.

3.

"You're short a crewman," Travis said.

"Yes," Blake said with the same cryogenic simplicity.

Orac said +...and Travis' detailed knowledge of Federation military data and protocols should prove invaluable,+ at the same time as Travis said, "So I'm here to replace him."

"And to what do we owe this touching change of heart?" Blake asked.

"Marryat haste, repent at leisure," Travis said. Nobody had a clue what he meant, but they could recognize the tone of voice that anticipated DIY open-heart surgery on the Federation. "Blake, there's no point in lying to you, if you don't know it already you'd find out soon enough. If I'd stayed put, I'd be for the high jump anyway. Now I'm a renegade, like you. If they catch me, it'll be the show trial, and then they'd do for me. Down to you, they don't transport anyone to C-A any more. It's a bullet in the back of the neck. Quite often after they've had their fun with you."

"Saves on the hyperspace running, anyway," Jenna said. "Have they cut down the cigarette tax to celebrate?"

"Afraid of dying?" Vila asked. "I'm glad to hear someone admit it besides me."

"No, I'm not," Travis said stubbornly. "But I'm sorry for what I've done."

"What do you think, love?" Blake asked, squeezing his lover's hand. "After what he's done to you, I'd take your opinion about what to do with him."

{{He might be useful}} Cally sent. {{Let's see what sort of information we can get out of him first. We can always kill him afterwards.}}

Travis couldn't quite pick up the words, but he didn't like the sound of that at all.

4.  
Avon carefully programmed in NOT commands so Travis' voice input would not be accepted, and neither heat signature would allow him to draw a Liberator gun. Orac had been sternly admonished not to do any further business with Travis. But that still left certain ship systems that he would be allowed access to.

"Show me how," Travis said.

"You've done it before," Vila said, sitting on the teleport console.

"Yes, but I was at the mercy of your fishtank then," Travis said.

"It's simple, really...you put on the bracelet, you press the red button, and you talk into it."

"The word? What's the word?"

"'Teleport'," Vila said.

Travis shook his head. "'Teleport'! Y'know, that's so fucking stupid I would never have guessed it in a million years. It'd be like the little bloke in the story wearing a big blue stick-on badge, 'Hello, my name is Rumplestiltskin.'"

5.  
Cally sank beneath the surface of the water, rinsing the suds out of her hair. When she emerged (a while longer than a Terran could have stayed under), Blake sat down on the rim of the tub and dabbed violet varnish on her toenails.

"Now that he's been around for a bit, can we trust him?"

"There are two aspects to that, you know," Cally said. "Do I believe that he's sorry for what he's done in the past? That's easy to believe--who wouldn't be?"

"Nearly anyone who'd done it, I suppose. How could you massacre unarmed civilians if you had any sense of remorse? Any conscience?"

"To be fair," Cally said, "We didn't have the resources for armies or pitched battles. What we did--what we had to do--was to make them think that anyone, at any time, might be a guerilla. That extended our resources, but if it made them feel insecure, well, it was supposed to. So he may have felt justified in following orders, and in fact the command may have felt justified in issuing them."

"What's the other thing?"

"As I say, I do believe he's sorry. The question is--can he change enough to fit in here? It's not easy to reverse the whole pattern of your life."

"It's an interesting question, what would constitute 'fitting in' around here. Are you saying that you can tolerate working with him, after what he did to you?"

"Roj, if we--when we win, we'll be so thinly spread that we won't be able to put our own people in all the positions of influence on all the planets. It'll take a generation to train them, free of the corruptions of the Federation. And in the meantime, we'll have to work with collaborators and quislings of all kinds."

Blake capped the bottle of nail varnish and set it down on the floor. "I'm not sure that loyalty is the worst impulse a man can have. It's better than not believing in anything."

"Oh, well, Avon would say that it's like that book he likes--the pigs turning into the men and so on--that all fanatics are basically indistinguishable."

"If the tables were turned, there'd be no chance of Travis forgiving us!--so I daresay that's the distinction we have to preserve."

"Then you answered your own question."

6.

"What the fuck good is this going to do?" Travis asked, as Avon balanced the tranquilizer tape on his forehead. The security bands on the surgical couch were firmly in place.

"Orac says that the memories may make you somewhat agitated. The tranquilizer will place you in a more relaxed and amenable mood. Then, when you cast your memory back to various times when you were present when Servalan accessed highly classified materials."

"You're deluding yourself if you think she told me anything," Travis said.

"No, of course not. But we all know more than we think we do, and we all have memories that are screened from the conscious mind. The purpose here is to capture the memories of her muscular movements, so we can reconstruct the codes."

Twenty minutes later, Avon asked Orac "Got all you need, then?"

+On five occasions, Servalan accessed high-level servers in Travis' presence. On nine occasions, she input codes known only to members of the High Council. On three occasions, there was a printout on Servalan's desk, portions of which were viewable upside-down. Further analysis is needed to see which if any of these procedures and documents can be reconstructed usefully.+

Avon took out Orac's key and carefully stowed it in his pocket. He tilted up the back of the med-couch and released the top band. "Here," he said, handing Travis a glass of water. "You look a bit washed out. Oh, don't worry--that was a read-only procedure. If we had mind-wipe technology, no one would let me use it, and we haven't implanted any suggestions."

"But they sent the only one who's been really shirty to me to take care of it," Travis said.

"What you fail to understand is that, in a recondite sense, I'm your only friend here. I'm the only one who'll give you what you want," Avon said. "Everyone else is falling over backwards to forgive you. That's no good to you. What you're begging for is for our hatred, so you can tell yourself that you're not such a bad chap after all, that you had your reasons. I say, fuck you and the rationale you rode in on. But it doesn't matter whether I can forgive you. Blake is the one you harmed, and he's a virtuoso of forgetting."

"What've you got against me?" Travis asked. "I didn't do anything to you, you said it yourself."

"Because you're a Regular Army Arsehole," Avon said. "I hate people like you. Miserable without a boot to kiss. The Federation's kicked you out, so now you've turned to the next candidate."

"Well, I don't think I'm the only person in the world, that's true," Travis said. "And people have got to have rules to follow. There's good rules, and bad rules, that's all."

"I don't admit the legitimacy of anyone telling me what to do. I'm sure I should prefer to be in a nature preserve, with Blake as the benevolent shepherd, to becoming part of Federation's alternative--a vindaloo," Avon said. "That is, if I were a sheep."

"Have you ever seen a sheep?" Travis asked. "A real one, I mean, not a whatyoumaycallem..."

"A metaphor," Avon said. "No, of course not. They're hardly encouraged in the Domes."

"Well, I have," Travis said. "Offworld. And they haven't got a fucking lot of initiative, I can tell you that for nothing. Bunch of woolly mutton mutoids. What sort of state would they be in, if the shepherd threw up his hands and said, 'You're free, mates, get on with it'"?

"The sheep worth knowing would figure something out."

"Why haven't you, then? Why are you still here, anyway? You've cost me a packet, you know. Every week in the office pool, I put down ten credits that you'd be selling out by Tuesday week."

Avon smiled--Travis noticed for the first time that he had dimples, it wasn't in his file but then it wasn't the sort of thing that would be--"You know how it is," Avon said. "First you tell yourself you'll always burn with a hard, gemlike flame, then you look around and it's forty-seven years later and you're pottering around your allotment planting savoy cabbages. Time stretches and the occasion never arises. And anyway, Blake's hot, don't you think?"

Travis shot him a look of loathing. "Don't think that because your mind's a cesspool, everybody's is."

"Don't bother, Travis, I read you. A man like you...spent your whole life in the Army. A fine, bracing, manly life, with your comrades. Far away from the civilized fripperies. The feminine values. A haystack is a fine environment for a hay-philiac needle," Avon said.

"Oh, shut up, you bloody little ponce."

"Ah," Avon said. "Demosthenes himself couldn't have put it more eloquently."

Vila, outside the door of the medical unit, enjoyed this exchange for several reasons.

7.

Travis sponged down the stainless-steel counter in the galley, then pulled off the thick yellow rubber washing-up glove with his teeth. The Liberator had an industrial dishwasher, of course. There was an element of ritual humiliation in making him wash the dishes.

He could hear someone walking into the galley, and analyzed the footfalls. "Hullo, Vila," he said. "What d'you want this time? Your boots blacked again? Your shirts starched?"

"Naaah," Vila said. "It was fun at first, but starched shirts rub my neck and my nice broken-in suede boots won't take a polish. I didn't have anything to do, thought I'd come and have a natter. It's nice and quiet--I think your old lot gave up chasing us for a while, you're at the top of the enemies list now, and it hasn't dawned on them to look for you here."

"They wouldn't. I suppose I should have been worried, when I started coming up with ways to think like Blake," Travis said.

"Meant you heart wasn't in what you were doing? A rebel at heart, after all?"

"I've always been a soldier," Travis said. "Always. Fight, that's the only thing I know how to do. I could deal with it, the fear, the risks, because I loved my country. Vila, think of what it was like for me to come to hate my country. Well, you must know what it's like, the other way round--to have your family give up on you, how bitter that is."

"Gawd!" Vila said. "No matter how bad you think things are, then you find out they could've been even worse. No, my family was always brilliant to me. Every time I got out, they'd be all glad to see me, throw a party for the whole district even if they had to pop everything in the flat that was movable. Fact is, sometimes I'd get out again and they'd still be paying for the party, last time out."

Travis looked at him oddly. One reason he thought that this ship laden with escaped convicts would be a livable environment was that he expected to find secret sharers who were equally wracked with guilt. "It's a lot for me to come to grips with," Travis said. "To have to admit to what I did. Maybe I should have just gone and hid in a cave someplace to come to terms with it. But this way, maybe I can make up for it, in some way that counts."

"Maybe you're even," Vila said. "I mean, yeah, you did for heaps of Blake's friends, but that was your job, and what happened to you was right in your body, so it's more personal, and most people would say Blake was the one who was out of line. And then he went and got some more friends."

"I went and got another arm and all," Travis said. "You could argue that it's better than the one I had. Not that I'd let anyone take off the other one. Why are you trying to make me feel better, anyway?"

"Oh, I always try to make everyone feel better," Vila said. "I've seen so much misery in my day, I can't be doing with any more. It's just that, around here, I'm playing a tough room."

8.

Although, as Avon saw it, Jenna's presence and occasional acquiescence had their advantages, her periodic estrangements also had their uses. In unimpaired privacy, Avon could devote the entire box of chocolate truffles to his own use, and could consume them properly, with no witnesses to what Jenna called the Avonic Sweet-Eating Ceremony. ("For gawdssake," she would say, licking her fingertips, "can't you just get on with it and eat the fucking things?")

He flicked on a bookplaque, and opened the lid of the box of truffles. He devoted a pleasurable couple of minutes to selecting two for current consumption, settling on one coconut praline and one thiurberry puree layered with chocolate ganache. (The kinds he didn't particularly like had already been consumed, or shared with Jenna.) He re-arranged the remaining truffles symmetrically, put the top back on the box, and put it back in his desk.

He sank his teeth into the truffle, closed his eyes to let the infinitesimal slice melt onto his tongue, then opened his eyes and started reading. He licked absently at the exposed edge of the chocolate truffle.

"There are only a few sublime masterpieces of the human spirit," the bookplaque began. Avon savored the feeling of his teeth going through the harder shell of the truffle, the softer layers of the center, and then through the shell again. He poured out a demitasse from the espresso machine.

"The confrontation of the blind Gloucester and the mad Lear is the climax of the play," Avon read, taking it quite personally. Then who was the Fool? He really hoped it was Vila.

9.

"Incoming message..." Cally said. "It's the Federation communications frequency."

"Put it up on the main screen," Blake said.

Servalan's image, transmitting from the lead pursuit ship, bloomed on the screen. "Travis, you're dead! Oh, and the rest of you as well, of course. Mutoids, commence fire!"

Travis turned his glass eye to the viewerscreen. "Funny," he said. "I can't see anything."

"Kiss me, Hardy," Vila muttered. He cast an anxious glance toward the screen.

"Shall we put up the force wall?" Cally asked.

"Not worth the bother," Avon said, making no effort to sprint to the force wall button.

The mutoids in Servalan's ship went through their well-accustomed routine of hurling fiery death.

To avoid the Christmas rush, Vila lay down under the console and cradled his head in his enlaced arms.

Nothing whatever happened. The mutoids, just on the off-chance, repeated their well-accustomed routine. Nothing whatever happened this time either. The mutoids imperturbably (well, what would you expect?) triggered the routine again. Evidently bugger-all had become institutionalized as the new routine.

"*Do* something," Servalan shrieked.

"No point in arguing with a computer, marm," the senior mutoid said. "But if you'd like to have a go..."

Jenna ambled over to Vila's position and launched a plasma bolt at the third pursuit ship in the wedge. She was a little late, so it merely scorched the ship's tail and sent it scurrying back to base.

Servalan clouted each of the mutoids, to which they reacted stoically. Servalan, who hadn't actually piloted a ship since her cadet days, stared at the controls. The control panel looked different to what she remembered. "Oh, just get us out of here," she snapped. "That is, if this piece of--*ship*--works at all."

The link to the Liberator was still live, so this exchange was cheered to the rafters. Vila climbed out from under the console. "Travis' idea works!" Vila said.

{{It was my idea, I waded around in his Stygian subconscious, and I did all the programming}} Avon thought. {{Typical.}} He glanced over at Jenna--he had a stereotypical response to surviving danger that would cut glass--but all he got was a withering look.

10.

"Everybody!" Blake boomed from the commlink. "Ah...that is...crew! Come to the flight deck, you'll want to see this."

Cally, yawning, a pair of trousers hastily pulled under Blake's pyjama jacket, ambled to the flight deck. Jenna handed her a mug of coffee.

Travis came in just as the vizfeed ended. He saw Gan, in a striped bathrobe over green scrubs, breathing heavily but grinning all over his face as he took a few large, shambling steps between parallel bars. When he got to the end, a petite dark-haired woman tried to catch him, but they both went sprawling out of the bottom of the frame as the picture faded out.

{{He's alive!}} Travis thought. {{Well, fuck me!}}

11.

Vila slotted the holothemes into the terminal on the desk in Travis' otherwise cell-like cabin. "You know...make it more cheerful," he said, as forest scenes and icescapes, exotic birds and light patterns flickered over the white walls. "The accommodations can be pretty basic, if you don't kick them up a bit. Me, I've got a Teasmaid, and some very choice illustrated lit'rachure, if you see what I mean, and I think you do, and an extra duvet..."

"What's it like here?" Travis asked, as much to interrupt the travelogue as to gather intelligence. "Not physically, but the people?"

"It's a sort of kennel, really," Vila said. "Zen keeps us all as pets. You know, like a bloke who has a really big house and lots of dogs and cats and parrots, you name it. Blake and Cally and me, we're the dogs. You know where you are with a dog, you can trust them. But the trouble is, Blake and Cally are a couple. Jenna and Avon, well, sometimes they'll, well, you know, whenever she gets so randy that she forgets how little time she has for him. And for a couple of days they strut around like they've had a nice feed of creamed canary. Then she remembers and it's off again, and they're fighting like...cats and cats, only circling around like a dog trying to go to sleep."

Travis could visualize it: a white Persian and a black Siamese, two bundles of slinky determination to occupy the very center of a single scarlet cushion.

"Why doesn't he just put his foot down?" Travis said.

"Well, he's not what you'd call a good person--I mean, if you had to write him a reference you'd have to admit he was sober and hard-working and conscientious, he's crooked as a dog's hind leg, you can say that for him--but he'd draw the line at that. Anyway, nobody tries anything on with Jenna. She's tough."

"He might try asking," Travis said, amused.

"Less that than the other," Vila said. "Asking, that's a confession of weakness for him. Glad you brought it up, though.  
That's the thing. Blake and Cally have each other. Avon and Jenna, they've got themselves. Even though they're not really on the same side, they're still like a tug-of-war team. They can't get round Cally because of Blake, and the other way around, but Blake and Cally can't really get rid of them either, because he's smart and she's the pilot. But where does that leave me, eh? So, speaking of asking, I thought that you and me, we could team up. You can give me protection, and I can give you me."

"Are you lot all queer? They said that about rebels, but I reckoned it was all propaganda."

"I'm not, specially," Vila said. "But you are, and I'm used to make-do and mend when it comes to my pleasures. Blake's not, Cally and Jenna neither. Avon's just bent on general principle. Jenna--and, I suppose, Avon, the same way you buy a ticket in the lottery when the jackpot's a hundred thousand credits--are hanging about hoping that Cally'll be out of the way."

"Birds in their little nests agree," Travis said. "I'm touched. Why was I breaking my balls trying to kill you if you're just going to do it yourselves? Mind you, Muggins was the only one using his special get-Blake budget assessment to actually get Blake."

"Oh, no, not that way," Vila said. "They figure that he'll get sick of her, so we'll go conquer a planet someplace and Blake'll make her the governor of it. Not that I think they're right--I don't make the news, I just report it. Now, as I was saying," Vila said, centrally locating his hand on Travis, who didn't seem like the type for subtlety.

Travis groaned and tried to push him away. Vila accorded this no credence, believing that if Travis felt really threatened, there would be a Vila-shaped hole in the wall. He brought down his other hand and kept stroking and squeezing at the cock that hardened and leapt beneath his hands. Then he disengaged one hand, used it to prise out the wrist that Travis bit down on to avoid crying out, and pulled Travis' head toward him.

12.

"It's a bit...conspicuous, wouldn't you say, Vila?" Travis asked.

"You're not in the army any more," Vila said. "Wouldn't it cheer you up to have something bright?" The scarlet tunic dropped right over Travis' head, and the belt buckle could easily be fastened with one hand.

"Suits you, that. I offered to go with you to Bucephor, fly the shuttle and so forth--they all fell about laughing at the idea of me volunteering for anything--but then they said no, you couldn't expect me to keep--ah, to watch--"

"It's all right, you can say it," Travis said. "*And* 'lend you a hand.' I'm over it."

"Right, then. They said I couldn't keep an eye on my own bloke," Vila said.

"Y'know, I'm not over that yet," Travis said.

"So they're sending Cally to fly the shuttle and see you don't sneak off. And anyway, she knows a bit about guerilla warfare, so I suppose she'd know if you nobbled the lecture."

13.

At the end of Vila's watch, the beginning of Avon's and Jenna's, Avon strolled to the flight deck. Vila and Travis were playing checkers--Vila sort of backhand, because he was sitting on Travis' lap.

"Still going to kill him?" Vila asked sarcastically, then tensed his thigh muscles for departure in case the answer was "Yes" and Avon decided to go through Vila first.

"No," Avon said. "That was an aberration on my part. It's the fanatics like Blake and your cohort there who think that killing a lot of people achieves something. As far as I can see, it doesn't. The dead don't rise if, as Cally says, you send them companions."

"Don't come over all virtuous, I've seen you shooting--shooting at me, in fact."

"If it's going to conduce to my self-preservation, well of course. But not to no sensible purpose. Not like you, on the Road to Damascus...and you've got Bob Hope right there in your lap. Luckily there aren't more ideologues like you and Blake, or the Universe would have perished long ago, to the grim satisfaction of those with their fingers on the trigger."

"Isn't there anything you believe in?" Travis asked.

"Once, I was fighting for me and mine. Now there's just me."

{{He must think his girl's dead}} Travis thought. {{In fact, he must think his girl's his girl and not ours--theirs. Well, he didn't rush to soothe my injured feelings by telling me about that big chap pulling through. So sod him anyway.}}

"Oh, ignore him," Jenna said, upon arrival. "He's got his nipples aimed at the ceiling, he does that when he's saying something he doesn't believe himself."

"He just feels shorter than usual," Vila said.

"Where'd we all be if everyone continually had designs on everyone else's money?" Jenna said.

"You'd have a nice quiet life to go out and get some more," Avon said. "And I daresay the money would enjoy the change of scenery."

14.

Travis took off the nano-laseron ring that he used as a pointer (irony had not died after Central Control) during the lecture to the Militant Wing of the People's Party of Bucephor. He sat down in the co-pilot's seat on the shuttle.

"Some of those things you said to the rebel garrison were very interesting," Cally said reluctantly. "I've barely studied guerilla warfare from the theoretical point of view, and what you said about defense by an entrenched post should come in handy for our Liberator missions, too. Perhaps you could repeat the lecture on the ship."

"Hardly worth it," Travis said. "Vila's not interested, Blake thinks he knows everything about warfare, Avon thinks he knows everything about everything, Jenna will ask me if she cares to know summat, and you've just heard it."

The shuttle lurched, the lights went out (apart from a few showers of sparks here and there), and the communications system and the backup communications system were both dead.

Cally drew her gun and whirled toward Travis. {{Did you do this?}}

"Cally, if I wanted to do for you, I could have done it back {{home}} on the Liberator--I don't have to commit suicide just to kill you." Travis groped through the compartments next to the instrument panel. He found a thermalume, lit it with the cigarette lighter in his trouser pocket, and swept it around the cabin of the shuttle.

"Well, get a move on, you dozy cow," he said. "Get me the replacement panel for the comm chassis and we'll swap it out. No point trying to do a pinpoint repair, when the fucking mess is this total."

"What replacement panel?" Cally asked, figuring that "I don't care for your tone of voice" wasn't much in the way of Famous Last Words.

"Fucksake! The one in the repair locker in every model of shuttle ever made...here, hold this," Travis said, handing her the thermalume. He wasn't familiar with this particular model, but there aren't a lot of places in the deck area of a shuttle to put something that weighs 1 kg, so he located the compartment soon enough. He didn't have the keycode, and didn't think Cally would be much help, so he grasped the edge of the door panel with his prosthetic hand and ripped it open. "Find the tool kit!"

Cally did--it was underneath the control panel--and Travis soon had the replacement panel jacked into place. "I don't understand," Travis said. "How can you just blithely step into something that you don't know the first thing about?"

"Shuttle maintenance isn't my responsibility," Cally said sulkily. "It's Gan's job."

"Oh, har bloody har," Travis said. "A little black comic relief, eh? Hoist with my own petard. Well, that should do it," he said, as the last fitting snapped into place.

You can get fairly far off course in twenty minutes at Standard by Two, so his first task was to establish where they were, then to re-establish the original course. Then, and only then, did he contact the by-now frantic crew of the Liberator.

When they got to the teleport bay, Jenna handed Cally a cup of herb tea, which she barely had time to sip before Blake embraced her.

"Catch," Avon said, tossing a handgun at Travis and strolling away.

"No doubt you had your own reasons, but...you brought her back to me. Thanks, I owe you one," Blake said, shifting so he had one arm around Cally's shoulder and one free to clap Travis on the shoulder.

"Oh, I'll remind you," Travis said.

Theoretically Vila was supposed to behave like the squire in a knightly epic, as he vested Travis with the charger and belt for the Liberator gun. Reliably, he used the occasion to generate some rather embarrassing byplay.

15.  
Blake tapped on the door of Travis' cabin. "Anything going on in there that I'd be distressed to see?"

"I'm polishing my boots, Blake...is that too much for your delicate constitution?"

"Well, you know what I mean," Blake said uncomfortably.

Travis shrugged on a shirt over his singlet, covering his artificial arm, then opened the cabin door.

"Travis, Jenna says that you tore a strip off her. Where do you get the infernal nerve to reprimand a member of my crew?"

"I hate fucking amateurs," Travis said. "She's the pilot. That makes her responsible for the condition of the ship and all its shuttles. If she lost a subordinate, she should have assigned someone else."

"That's as may be, but any criticism of that sort should--and will--come from me."

"Yes, sir," Travis said, wondering about the proportion of irony in the mixture. "Makes me wonder, though. What do you think you're playing at--overthrowing the government or running an amateur choral society?"

"Been to an eistedfodd? Not as much difference as you might think. Do me a favor, Travis. Why don't you wait till the next time Avon denounces me as a demented militarist? I can always hope the two waves will cancel each other out."

"All I can say is, there's a right way and a wrong way to manage a crew."

"Considering that the crew in question consists of my girl, your boyfriend, a pilot whom we depend on daily and hourly, and the single most bloody-minded individual in the history of the species, I'd be delighted to hear your suggestions."

"In the end," Travis said, "Winning is the only safety."

**Author's Note:**

> The title is an anagram of "Hostage" plus "Pressure Point" which this sort of is.


End file.
